Every now and again we are asked if we have a way of assigning points to goals so that our guests can keep score.

We have never done that, mainly because in our experience is not necessary. We believe you can have as much fun in one of our games if you fail all of your goals, and making it competitive might undermine that.

(I do suspect that the customers who ask this haven’t played out hosted one of our games, as if they had then they’d know not to ask. But that’s just a guess.)

But some people do ask if it can be done, and one of our customers in Japan is going to try it out. (They run a boardgame cafe, so maybe their customers do like a clear sense of keeping score.)

So if your want to try this as well, this is how I would do it.

Out of ten

First, I’d divide ten points among a character’s goals. Most of our characters have 3 to 5 goals, and I would divide the points pretty evenly.

Where I can’t give them all the same points, I would give the easier goals more points than the harder goals. Obviously that’s a judgement call, and possibly a tricky one to make if you’re not as familiar with the game as we are.

I would do this for two reasons:

First, higher scores are more motivating. So giving more points for the easier goals means that your players will feel like they are getting somewhere.

Second, some of the goals are verging on impossible (I’m thinking of the ones where you are told to try and keep something a secret – never easy when we have all those abilities). So give those goals fewest points so that the player isn’t penalised if they don’t succeed in them.

But apart from that, I would spread the points fairly evenly.

For example, for a character with four goals, I’d give the two easiest three points each, and the others two points each. You can just write this next to the goal.

Murderer

Murderers usually have a goal saying something like “don’t get caught” which is a bit of a challenge given that we are playing on a murder mystery game in which solving the murder is a big part.

So the way I would treat that is to consider the goal successful if, when it comes to choosing who the murderer is (at the end of the party, before the solution is read out), most people choose someone else.

Other ways to score points

So that gives us 10 points if you achieve all of your goals. But I would also add other ways to score points:

Use all of your abilities at least once

Exhaust at least one of your abilities

Complete both of your tips for beginners

Talk to everyone in the game

End the game with less money than you started with (for those that don’t need money).

Reveal your secret to another characters

Reveal your clue at at least three other characters

Everyone should have five of these, and I would score them two points each. So everyone would have a maximum score of 20.

I have two reasons for adding these extra points:

First, they make it easy to score points. Unlike character goals, nobody will try to stop you from achieving these objectives.

Second, these activities are all actions that we want to encourage in one of our games, and doing them will make the game flow better.

Scorecards, explanations, and prizes

I would prepare a scorecard for each player, listing their goals and their scores, and the additional actions. I would include the scorecard in the character packet.

At the start of the party, during the introductory briefing I would explain the scorecards so that everyone can keep their own score. (I would trust the players to do that themselves rather than rigorously police it .)

Of course, once players are keeping score your are going to need a prize for whoever has the highest score.

Let us know

If you do try this out, we’d love to hear what you did and how it worked.

Your can reach us via our contact page, our Facebook page or through the comments below.

We’re delighted to present for sale three new games from Peaky Games: Best of the Wurst, The Day the Music Died, and Small Town Folks.

If Peaky Games sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve talked about it previously on our blog. Peaky is a writing weekend in Derbyshire for writing and the playing interactive (or “freeform”) games much like ours.

Peaky Games have taken some of their games, polished and updated them, and published them. If you’ve played a few of our games, we think that you may enjoy these games.

(This is from Murder on the Dance Floor – we don’t have any photos for these new games yet!)

The games are:

Best of the Wurst: In Castle Quimper Hotel in 1942 Occupied France Colonel Kronenburg has organised a sausage tasting competition – the best German wurst against sausages from across Europe! Is there any doubt who will win? Best of the Wurst is for 9 guests plus a host, aged 12+.

The Day the Music Died: Set at Radio Rebecca, the grooviest radio station in the English Channel in 1965. The Day the Music Died is for 10 guests plus a host, aged 12+

Small Town Folks: Macy, Nebraska, in 1962 is a small town like any other. But when the hurricane approaches, twelve people are trapped by a storm. Tensions rise, secrets spill, and long-buried rivalries erupt… Small Town Folks is for 12 guests plus a host, aged 15+.

The games written at Peaky are very similar in structure to our murder mysteries – everyone gets their own character sheet with goals and objectives, and information about other people, and they take between two and three hours to play through.

(Those similarities are not a coincidence, as we’re members of Peaky Games and have helped co-write some of the games.)

There are a few differences though.

First, they aren’t murder mysteries. Although sometimes there’s a death involved in the backstory, the game is rarely about investigating the death. Instead, the death is the background to some of the plots.

Second, the Peaky Games freeforms don’t usually have abilities, secrets or clues. The games generally don’t need them – secrets will come out naturally during the course of play, and clues are woven through the character backgrounds.

Third, these games are written for more experienced hosts. They expect you to use your common sense to resolve issues and questions. As a result, we wouldn’t recommend these if you haven’t run one of our games first.

Fourth, the games often include geeky ideas and concepts. Although the games we’ve selected here are mostly normal games, Best of the Wurst does contain a vampire!

But if you’ve played or hosted one of our games before, you won’t find anything too unfamiliar in them!

As with our other games, we offer a 30-day no-quibble money back guarantee on these games.

I’m getting ready to run Court in the Act in three weeks time. I was just sending out character assignments tonight, and realized I accidentally listed Sir Walter Raleigh twice in my list, so I have two different people down to play him! My cast list/assignments is full, and I already have Ginger Roberts assigned as a character.

I recall seeing somewhere that sometimes folks have made a role a ‘twin’ (two people play the same person), but before I go that route, I was just wondering if you happen to have any ‘extra’ characters floating around for this mystery that I can try out?! Or any other ideas you may have for me? Unfortunately I don’t have time to create an additional character role myself.

Our response:

It’s easy to make these kinds of casting slips! I’m sorry to say that we don’t have any more extra characters for Court in the Act, unfortunately — no-one has ever sent anything in for this particular game.

The simplest type of character to introduce at short notice would be another servant / lowly person — because it’s easier to explain the presence of someone like that than it is another important noble. They could be focused on information gathering / brokering — perhaps acting as an informal agent for one of the powers. Perhaps a secret Catholic? And some sort of interpersonal rivalry/affection/romance plotlines going on with Hobbs and Nagel? And they could maybe have information incriminating the murderer, as they are a little hard to identify at present.

Otherwise if you do decide to go down the ‘twin’ route (which means that the character’s are virtually identical in terms of goals and much of the background), that is of course very much in keeping with the Shakespearean theme — a twin Raleigh could be an interesting twist and cause a lot of fun.

We must have inspired Pam because then a couple of weeks later she sent us two additional characters for Court in the Act that she had written with her co-host Jeremy. We’ve now made them available for download when you buy the game files:

They’re hard to describe, and if you’ve not seen or played in one, they’re fairly hard to imagine.

So here’s a moment from Hollywood Lies, sent to us by Julie D’Augusta. In this scene, Jules Milton is being thrown out from the Post-Modern Freeform Movement (one of many plots in Hollywood Lies, and nothing to do with the main murder plot).

Pickpocketing can be a divisive mechanic amongst experienced freeformers (although I’ve never heard any of our customers complain about it). On one hand it’s a useful mechanic for replicating a real-life skill (one that is thankfully rare); on the other hand it can be particularly demoralising to have spent all game trying to get hold of something only to have it stolen by someone unknown.

My experience is that some players hoard their items, and pickpocketing is a valid way of forcing items to move around the game. But if pickpocketing is so unpopular, what should we do about it?

I’ve been thinking about this, and solving other minor crimes, for a while. I wrote about it on my blog, following Shogun, a weekend freeform. Before that I’d written about solving in-game crimes, and about pickpocketing specifically.

So someone who has been pickpocketed can find a detective and ask them to investigate. The detective checks with a Host and plays scissors-paper-stone:

• Host wins: The detective learns nothing.
• It’s a tie!: The detective learns who was behind the crime, but doesn’t have definitive proof.
• Detective wins: Proof of the crime! The Host gives the detective the completed Pickpocket Use slip as evidence that they have solved the crime. This is enough evidence to bring before a judge (see below.)

The detective can then go back to the victim with the news that they’ve either identified the culprit (and maybe even have sufficient evidence to try them) or that they haven’t.

Punishment: If proof of the crime exists, then the evidence may be taken to the
Judge, sheriff or whoever is responsible for dispensing justice. They should be given
the following slip in their character sheet:

As a guide, punishments should, if possible, improve a player’s game rather than detract from it.

Wrapping up

The intent of these additional rules is not necessarily to punish the wrongdoer, but to create more plot for the players by exposing secrets and shining light on dark deeds. Even if the culprit is known, the investigation doesn’t necessarily result in hard evidence that you can take to a judge. However, that shouldn’t stop the victim from dramatically confronting the pickpocket and demanding their goods back.

Not all of our games have a character suitable to give the sentencing guidelines to. In those games, evidence of pickpocketing can be dealt with during the game wrap by asking the investigating characters what they intend to do.

I experimented recently with printing our money at approximately life-size, and it looks really good – and feels much more like money.

This experiment was inspired by the photograph above from Way out West. Sent to us by Jaqui French, I was intrigued by the dollar bills. Those look like the graphics from our money cards, but printed extra large (they look about life-size).

And I think they look great.

So I thought I’d see what printing life-size money would look like for one of our other games, and as I’ve recently prepared and hosted Death on the Gambia, I thought I’d do that same.

The result is below – I also printed some of the normal money cards as a comparison. Overall I think they look much better.

All the money

If you want to do this yourself, here (at the bottom of this page) are the image files that we have used for all of our games so far. (As we add more, we’ll try and remember to add them to this page. If we forget, please don’t hesitate to nudge us.)

You may wish to print different denominations on different coloured paper – we’ll leave that up to you.

Printing the money

The easiest way we’ve found to print the money is to use the Windows print function – simply select the file, right-click, and select “Print”. This brings up a dialogue box (below). For Death on the Gambia I just selected four copies to a sheet. (I also printed them double sided.)

Money money money!

To download the files just right click on the image and select “save as…”. And enjoy!

Files from our customers

Kaye Anfield sent us these spooky $10,000 bills for use with Halloween Lies.

It’s the start of a new year, and that means it’s time for our traditional time to reflect on the previous year. We’ve been doing this since 2013.

Hollywood Lies

2018 was our best year so far in terms of sales. We sold 28% more games on 2017, and we finally beat our 2011 previous best. No doubt the drop in the exchange rate has helped us there – we’ve never raised our prices in the nearly 17 years we’ve been trading.

Overall our top three games accounted for 28% of our sales (similar to last year).

New and updated games

We finally published The Reality is Murder in 2018. This has been brewing for a while, and Steve is a bit ashamed at how long it has taken to get this far. But now that’s it’s finished, we’re really happy with it.

Murder at Sea

Freeformgames.com

In 2018 we removed the discussion forums from the site. They weren’t much used, and they were a target for spam. This meant that they required much more maintenance than we were comfortable with.

So we went through the forum and harvested all the great tips and advice and added that to a new set of hints and tips pages. Hopefully these are easier to use than the forum, and if you have a tip of your own please do send it to us via our Contact Us page.

What about our plans for 2018?

Way out West

We set ourselves some goals for 2018. This is how we did:

Improve our website: While we did remove the discussion forum, we didn’t restructure freeformgames.com to make it simpler and more intuitive. We started the planning for that, but we didn’t actually implement any of the changes. At least, not yet.

Publish The Food is to Die For: We hoped that this would be ready for 2018, but sadly didn’t make it.

Publish The Reality is Murder: Success – we published The Reality is Murder in October 2018.

Publish Murder on the Istanbul Express: Again, we hoped this would be ready for 2018, but we didn’t make it in time.

So of our four goals we one solid success and one partial success (improving the website). We failed our other two goals.

Plans for 2019

Our plans for 2019:

Improve our website: We’ve started the planning for improving the website to make it easier to navigate, and in 2019 we’ll make those changes. (Although we’ve been saying that for a couple of years now – we need to make it happen instead of just talking about it.)

PublishThe Food is to Die For and Murder on the Istanbul Express. Both are very close and just need pushing over the line.

Update Under the Big Top or Happy Birthday RJ. Both of these games are still in their original format, and need updating to our current format. We haven’t decided which of these to do yet.

Improve our use of Facebook: One of our customers recently asked if we were still in business because we hadn’t updated our Facebook page in over two months. That’s not a good sign, so we’re going to make more use of Facebook in 2019.

Brexit – the big unknown

We’re based in the UK and right now, despite being less than three months away, it’s still not clear how Brexit will affect us. That’s because our Government seems to be more concerned with in-fighting than providing a good deal and clarity for business.

From what we can see so far, our customers won’t see any difference, however there will be some additional administrative burden for us, particularly in relation to dealing with EU VAT (as we will lose access to the one-stop service that we currently enjoy as members of the EU). But as we aren’t reliant on a complicated supply chain, that should be about it.

But as I write it seems that there is still all to play for in Brexit-land, so who knows where we will end up.

TL;DR – 2018 was a great success

So overall, 2018 was a great success for Freeform Games, and we’re hoping we can build on that in 2019.

The recent playtests for The Reality is Murder worked really well. We asked for playtesters via our newsletter, and eventually had four groups providing us with great feedback that really improved the game and ironed out a few kinks that we hadn’t spotted.

And even though we have been writing and publishing these games for nearly 20 years, I’m still learning new things. So amongst all the specific playtest feedback, there were a couple of issues that appeared that I think we need to carry across to other games.

Missing characters

While we already provide instructions for what to do if some characters aren’t used, it seems that one of our playtesters missed them, and got a bit confused.

So I made the following change: where items are reassigned, I added a handout to be added to the affected character envelope. This should make it clearer as to what needs to be done when not all the characters are being played.

Solving the murder

One of our playtesters noted that towards the end of the mystery some of the characters had finished their goals, and if they had had a goal to solve the murder, could have been working towards that.

I didn’t want to add a goal to every character to tell them to solve the murder because that’s a player objective rather than a character objective. But I realised that the host could remind the players of that objective during the game.

So added a note to the hosts’ introductory speech about solving the murder: “At the end of the evening I will ask everyone to indicate who they think murdered Jeff Thompson. So see if you can piece the evidence together and work out who murdered Jeff, and why.”

I also added an announcement in the timeline (and Quick Reference Sheet) towards the end of the game, reminding everyone to try and identify the murder.

That way the players are reminded that they can still solve the murder, while the characters are still the characters.

Our other games

And with The Reality is Murder finally finished, these changes now need to be added (where applicable!) to our other games.

That’ll be something we do over time as we update our games – starting with Hollywood Lies and Halloween Lies (both of which have now been updated).